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Saturday, September 27, 2008

New York moments

These last few weeks my husband and I travelled to France, stopping in New York both ways to rest and visit a city I had never visited.First admission, I'm terrified of traffic and crowds, though I spent most of my adult life on the L. A. freeways.

New York is a new category. It is an experiment in assault of the senses. Our first experience was catching the super shuttle to the hotel in mid=city Manhattan. The trip from the airport to the hotel should have taken forty minutes, max. First, the driver of the super shuttle managed to do his own arranging, selecting his passengers rather than follow the number system that the people at the information desk had arranged. When we complained, and another driver was found for us, we spent inordinate amount of time circling the city, to drop people off and to avoid traffic, according to the driver. Some passenger who knew the city knew better and kept arguing with him. He kept following his own beat.

He dropped us off at the wrong Sheraton, across the street, as it turned out,giving us a chance to cross a busy street in the middle of the night with suitcases in tow, tired, disoriented and pushed along to cross streets with traffic coming at us in all directions. Fortunately, the porters at the Sheraton rescued us right away and we were swiftly checked in and into our room that was big enough to contain our bed and our luggage without much room to turn around. Out the window, we were so high that we couldn't see the street below.

Hungry and tired, we managed to get out to have a bite at a lovely diner with singing waiters. Really good entertainers working in a diner, charming the tourists and keeping us from collapsing. New York at its best and its worst, on the same street, in the same evening.

The next morning, we walked to a deli for breakfast, enough food to feed an army. I ordered a corned beef sandwich that had enough meat to feed an entire family for a week.